Clarifying Implicit and Underspecified Phrases in Instructional Text

Talita Anthonio, Anna Sauer, Michael Roth

Abstract
Natural language inherently consists of implicit and underspecified phrases, which represent potential sources of misunderstanding. In this paper, we present a data set of such phrases in English from instructional texts together with multiple possible clarifications. Our data set, henceforth called CLAIRE, is based on a corpus of revision histories from wikiHow, from which we extract human clarifications that resolve an implicit or underspecified phrase. We show how language modeling can be used to generate alternate clarifications, which may or may not be compatible with the human clarification. Based on plausibility judgements for each clarification, we define the task of distinguishing between plausible and implausible clarifications. We provide several baseline models for this task and analyze to what extent different clarifications represent multiple readings as a first step to investigate misunderstandings caused by implicit/underspecified language in instructional texts.
Anthology ID:
2022.lrec-1.354
Volume:
Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
June
Year:
2022
Address:
Marseille, France
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Frédéric Béchet, Philippe Blache, Khalid Choukri, Christopher Cieri, Thierry Declerck, Sara Goggi, Hitoshi Isahara, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Hélène Mazo, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association
Note:
Pages:
3319–3330
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.lrec-1.354
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Talita Anthonio, Anna Sauer, and Michael Roth. 2022. Clarifying Implicit and Underspecified Phrases in Instructional Text. In Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 3319–3330, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.
Cite (Informal):
Clarifying Implicit and Underspecified Phrases in Instructional Text (Anthonio et al., LREC 2022)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-2/2022.lrec-1.354.pdf
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